My ebook: Journeys with the caterpillar

My ebook"Journeys with the caterpillar: Travelling through the islands of Floresand Sumba, Indonesia" is available at this link

Saturday, November 07, 2009

Cityscape: A regular tourist

Here I am in this god forsaken country. The taxi driver had already ripped me off on the way from the airport to the hotel. The dirt and squalor is all around, and I found a few bed bugs as well. This is not how they do things back in my country. And the people can’t even understand basic English; what can be the future of this place? Damn those tourist books and reviews. I guess they are written by people who would be mighty pleased even to look at their nose hair in the mirror. Have you ever read a bad review about a place? And oh yes, the favorite last line of any travel book, “…and most importantly, I cannot forget the unbelievable warmth of the people from this place..”. Hello Mr. Travel Writer, have you tried interacting with a zoo animal, their warmth will make you forget all those lovely people. Blame the Persians, they are the ones who started calling all places “paradise on earth”. They don’t have HBO in the stupid hotel.

Ok, there goes the rice terraces, there I spotted a monkey, ha ha. Kingdom come. Why bother to trek in this sweltering heat listening to the childish blabber of the tour guide? And these fellow tourists; most of them are old haggards, masters of sugar-coated condescension, treating a person manning a potter’s wheel like a toddler learning to say “A”. And yeah, many of these tourists are red-faced gays, recovering emotionally from the recent referendum in their home state that put a final seal on marriage being possible only between short and long haired puppies. The tour guides, slimy bastards, covering up their greed for my dollars with their tooth-decay smile. Whenever I start to argue with them on what they should do for me, they pretend not to understand English. What is tourism if not an opportunity to pay people to suck up to you? I have enough pictures to dominate my facebook status for a few days. Anyway, now that I am here, I might as well make the most of it. The shopping must be cheaper than back home. And hallelujah, women here must be damn cheap as well.

It’s time to go back. I did what is expected of any human being; spend the annual holidays in a foreign location. And when I meet those stupid colleagues of mine, I know what to say, “It was fantastic, you should go there with Linda once”. If the bloody guy listens my complete sentence, he will be bound to say, “Oh yes, sure, we will talk to you to get some info”. Ha ha, at least, I managed to cause some inconvenience to you.